RIM appeases United Arab Emirates with time to spare before threatened Oct. 11 ban

After
months of wrangling with various Middle Eastern and Asian countries
over security issues, Research In Motion, the makers of BlackBerry,
are finally in compliance with the United Arab Emirates.

Back
in July, government regulators in the UAE expressed concerns over
BlackBerry's encryption, which didn't comply with security
legislation passed in 2007. Local authorities could not trace the
encrypted data used in BlackBerry services -- e-mail, BlackBerry
messenger, etc. -- because it is sent to offshore servers. The UAE
cited this as a threat to national security.

In
response, RIM said that their servers were set up that way for a
reason, and that not even the company itself could access customers'
data. In short, they implied that compliance would be impossible.

However,
the pressure on RIM continued to mount, as
Saudi Arabia, India, and Indonesia all
joined the fold, threatening to ban BlackBerry services within
their borders as well. With an impending ban in Saudi Arabia, RIM
began to cooperate and started testing servers within the country to
host the BlackBerry services. RIM also began
complying with the Indian authorities, avoiding a ban that would
have affected approximately one million users.

Now,
just short of an October 11 deadline for compliance in the
UAE, Reuters is
reporting that
RIM has made all the necessary changes to appease the government
there.

"The
Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) has confirmed that
BlackBerry services are now compliant with the UAE's
telecommunications regulatory framework," said a statement on
state news agency WAM. "Therefore all BlackBerry services
in the UAE will continue to operate as normal and no suspension of
service will occur on October 11, 2010."

No
further details of the agreement that was reached between the two
entities were given, raising the issue of possible privacy concerns.

"If you look at the last five years, if you look at what major innovations have occurred in computing technology, every single one of them came from AMD. Not a single innovation came from Intel." -- AMD CEO Hector Ruiz in 2007